Percutaneous liver biopsy (PLB) is the gold standard for grading necroinflammation and staging fibrosis in patients with chronic viral hepatitis. Whether the use of 1-deamino-8-D-arginine vasopressin (DDAVP) before PLBs in hemodialysis (HD) patients with chronic viral hepatitis has comparable safety profiles to those with normal renal function (NRF) has not been evaluated in prospective studies.

Chronic viral hepatitis is common in dialysis patients, with the reported prevalence and annual incidence of 3-80% and 2.9%, respectively. Currently, percutaneous liver biopsy (PLB) remains the gold standard for grading necroinflammation and staging fibrosis in patients with liver diseases. In addition, liver histology can help clinicians determine the eligibility of renal transplantation, prognosis, and necessity of antiviral therapy in dialysis patients with chronic viral hepatitis. In chronic hepatitis patients with normal renal function (NRF), the risks of fatal and non-fatal hemorrhage after liver biopsies for non-malignant diseases were 0.04% and 0.16%, respectively. However, the relative risks of post-biopsy hemorrhage in CHC patients with end-stage renal disease to those with NRF remain disputed.

Deamino-8-D-arginine vasopressin (DDAVP), a synthetic analogue of vasopressin, is a commonly used hemostatic agent to treat uremic bleeding by inducing the release of von Willebrand factor (vWF) and factor VIII from their storage sites in endothelial cells.Previous studies have shown that one dose of 0.3-0.4μg/kg body weight DDAVP infusion for dialysis patients could normalize bleeding time (BT), and prevent surgical and renal biopsy bleeding. Nevertheless, two recent studies showed divergent liver biopsy-related bleeding complication rates (0% and 6%, respectively) in dialysis CHC patients pre-treated with DDAVP. Since most studies evaluating the safety of PLB in CHC patients with dialysis were small and retrospective in nature, and not controlled by the biopsy route, the type of biopsy needle, the use of ultrasound guidance, or the number of passes,further studies are urgently needed to solve this important issue. Thus, we aimed to conducted a large clinical trial to compare the safety profiles of PLB between CHC patients with hemodialysis (HD) who were pretreated with DDAVP and those with NRF by the same biopsy technique.

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Please refer to this study by its ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT00635310